


Colossus

by KrinnDNZ



Series: NaPoWriMo 2014 [3]
Category: Dream Cycle - H. P. Lovecraft, Global Frequency, Shadow of the Colossus
Genre: Gen, apotheosis, glowbro, glowpersons, pfaf, postfurry, spacelady
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 02:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2605295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrinnDNZ/pseuds/KrinnDNZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a giant sea-monster flies up out of Monterey Bay and over the mountains towards San Jose, you call Miranda Zero and the thousand-and-one geniuses, punks, and freaks of the Global Frequency. The Global Frequency pulls a marine biologist off his surfboard and commandeers an entire airport as they sprint to communicate with the monster before the Air Force gets a chance to throw explosives at the problem.</p><p>---</p><p>The woman in the black suit stepped forward and waved to Rob commandingly; he stepped forward to meet her. <em>"Robert Martinez?"</em> He nodded. <em>"You're on the Global Frequency."</em> She smiled and offered him a gloved hand. <em>"I'm Miranda Zero. I read your paper about deep-sea animal communication patterns."</em> She turned and shaded her eyes, looking after the departing colossus, then faced him again. <em>"We're going to need your help."</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Colossus

The chatter of San Francisco International's control tower washed around pale, skinny Tony Lopez as he stood before a workstation, its back open, brightly-colored wires flowing around to the front where he tapped away at a laptop, the glowing logo on its lid covered by a translucent magenta sticker. One of the airport's own employees stood on the other side from Tony, attaching the hefty box beside the laptop to the workstation.

"I gotta ask," he said, "what this thing's gonna actually do."

"Dynamic runways," Tony said, watching a map of the airport glow on his screen. "There's already a ton of lighting out there. So it's getting wired up and color controlled, gonna use it to guide planes in and out faster - it's another channel for communicating with the pilots."

The airport electrician nodded as he took off the top of the workstation and put it aside, then picked up a replacement plate covered with knobs.

"Looks like my son's DJ equipment," he quipped.

Tony grinned back. "Of course. Just hook the whole airport's sound system in here and we'll run it off that," he joked.

The electrician opened his mouth, then looked aside abruptly as one of the controllers swore loudly. Everyone in the room crowded around the monitors.

"What the _fuck_ is that?"

"No idea, way too big, showed up outta nowhere."

"That's Santa Cruz?"

"More like Monterey."

"Call the fucking Air Force, what the fucking fuck—"

"Do we have a missing Dreamliner or something, look at the size of the—"

"Get that Lufthansa guy the fuck off the runway, you can't let him fly into that—"

"Southwest four-four-niner-three is asking if we—"

Tony pulled out his phone with one hand and grabbed the electrician with his other. On the back of his phone was a white circle with four small triangles around it.

"Aleph? This is 314, I'm seeing something big here." After hearing only a little, he turned back to the electrician, waving beckoningly to him. "Stay. We're gonna need help."

* * *

Surfers on the waves off Moss Landing bobbed liked dolls in a child's bathtub, their bright neoprene suits visible from the beach against the blue-brown water. They moved in a loose cloud, circulating out to the bay and zipping back in on their boards. Among them Rob laughed, splashing water back and forth with a friend, his curly hair dripping as it hung above his shoulders. His rough short beard dripped onto his suit as he clambered onto his board well out in the bay: he looked out, spotted a swiftly-growing swell in the distance, and perched on his board to wait for it.

On the shore, a heavy black BMW moved in aggressively, whipping along the curl of the road, then crunching over the gravel of the parking lot, tilting and settling as it came to a stop, leaving little mounds beside its wheels. A pale, dark-haired woman in a black suit stepped out of the passenger side and crisply walked towards the beach. Spotting the swell moving towards shore, she pursed her lips. The driver, a heavyset black man in a pink polo shirt and dark slacks, followed her: he held his phone up with both hands, frowning a little at the video coming through it. On its back was a circle, around which four small triangles were evenly spaced.

Out in the bay, the surfers spoke worriedly to each other. The swell was more than big, it was an aberration among other waves, rising above them, looming. They could see a discoloration in the water as it approached, some paddling away from it hastily, some watching tensely. The swell rose and rose until its peak split and waves broke down the sides to fling the surfers towards the beach, water crashingly falling away from a colossus climbing into the air through the spray.

First a long head with an upswept horn leading its snout, then a sleek-scaled body, then a great tail ending in a flat paddle ascended from water into air. The colossus writhed as it came into view: a fin-winged, legless beast, it shed streams of water and gleamed in the late afternoon sun, its ridged wings flexing. Its underside bore long lines and whirls of glowing points in colors like the entire population of a coral reef, and it let out a haunting cry as it turned and ascended in the sky above the bay. Its tail swung back and forth as it gradually aligned itself and moved north following the curve of the coast, a series of smaller cries falling from it and fading as it moved away.

Rob staggered onto the beach with the crowd of surfers, gaping at the colossus as it receded gradually. Sand collected on wet feet as they trudged up the beach, pairs and trios talking excitedly. Conversations took a surly turn as they noticed the black car blocking the way out of the parking lot. The woman in the black suit stepped forward and waved to Rob commandingly; he stepped forward to meet her.

"Robert Martinez?"

He nodded.

"You're on the Global Frequency."

She smiled and offered him a gloved hand.

"I'm Miranda Zero. I read your paper about deep-sea animal communication patterns." She turned and shaded her eyes, looking after the departing colossus, then faced him again. "We're going to need your help."

Rob shook her hand, then shaded his eyes and looked north with her.

"So you want to go after that thing?"

She nodded.

"We've been after it all day: satellites caught it as a temperature anomaly south of Kiribati early this morning. _RV Kaholo_ out of Hawaii caught a glimpse of it later, and it passed right under _RV Rachel Carson_ a few hours ago. 901 here—"

"Kenny."

"Hi."

"—and I have been coming up the coast since then, looking for you. It took a while: your boyfriend's not very good with beach names. But here we are—and here it is."

Rob put his mouth to one side, frowning, as he continued to watch the colossus.

"It crossed the whole Pacific in a day? I'm not gonna help anyone shoot at it, then—I want to know how it did that. It's not moving that fast right now." He squinted. "Look at those colors," he mused.

"We're not going to shoot at it. The Navy called _us_ for this. There are a thousand and one people on the Global Frequency, and this is what we do. We figure out things like this—especially when the world's governments have a sudden attack of good sense and decide to use something other than shooting as their first resort."

"How often does _that_ happen?"

"Get in the car and we'll work on making it happen more often."

Rob smiled widely, drops of water shining in his beard.

"Sounds good to me."

* * *

The BMW's motor snarled and it threw gravel as it pulled out of the beach's parking lot, roaring up the road towards Santa Cruz. Rob swayed in the back seat, frowning down at a tablet as he flipped through data and pictures. Miranda Zero sat next to him, making terse phone calls.

"So you narrowed it down to some time in the night in the Tonga trench, and then it went east from there. Okay. You just happened to be watching the Tonga trench?"

"We've been talking with Barbara Mellers' Judgment Project out in Maryland. The Tonga Trench was one of their crowd's shortlist choices for an anomaly like this. Turns out that the Apollo 13 mission's radioisotope generator is down there—and it was heavily quarantined between its return to earth and being sunk. So we started keeping an eye on it a few years ago. Two weeks ago there were some earth movements we picked up on, and so when things came to a head this morning we made a few calls and turned out to be a lot more prepared than the Air Force was."

"How prepared is that?"

"Not very, but one hell of a lot better than 'totally pants-around-ankles unprepared.'"

Rob swiped through more pages on the tablet, mumbling to himself, wiping water from his beard with his forearm as he used his other hand to zoom in on a diagram.

"How do you have spectroscopy on this?"

"You're looking at what we call a spaghetti report," the driver called back. "Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Scrolling to the report's end, Rob winced at its page number, then went back to the spectroscopy. Miranda Zero made another brief call, then turned to him.

"My turn for questions. The colossus came from the ocean. Does it look more benthic, or more like something aerial that just took a dip?"

"Well, you said that it came from the trench, so it's probably got some benthic adaptations. Fins don't quite fit, though, and the gas pouches, those'd collapse at depth. So it doesn't spend all its time down there. Maybe a lifecycle thing: juveline stage in the depths, adult at the surface?"

"Okay, don't get stuck on that. Would you say it's more likely to communicate with vocalizations, lights, or something else?"

"From what I saw earlier, it could be both. Has anyone else gotten it on video yet?"

"We're working on that: it's heading north over the mountains towards San Jose. Scattered reports. Winding roads out there, not a densely populated area, not a whole lot of signaling. When it hits Los Gatos we should get plenty. And a whole lot of panic, which is going to be an issue because people will get in their cars."

"Shit. Where are _we_ going?"

"We're still working on that. Back to you. How long is it likely to fly for? When it's done flying, is it more likely to settle itself on land or in water?

"I'd need to watch some footage of the gas chambers it's got."

Rob and Miranda Zero swayed in unison as the driver took a corner optimistically. Miranda's phone buzzed briskly.

"You're in luck."

Reaching over, she made a few brisk taps: Rob leaned in as a video began playing. Grainy and shaky, captured from a cheap phone, it showed the colossus from a suburban street. It swam through the sky some distance away, perpendicular to the camera-wielder's line of vision. Lights glowed along its sides. Rob squinted, leaned in, and expanded the video until it was jagged and harsh, but the colossus filled the frame.

"If we could send a test pattern at it, I bet I could make some very good guesses. In this video it's got the same breathing motion I saw, same gas sacs. Looks like an adaptation for sustained flight. So I wouldn't expect it to set down any time soon."

"I can practically hear Aleph thinking 'I told you so.' Aleph, are we that far down the contingency plan list yet, can we get anyone with lights?"

Rob's tablet beeped, then spoke in sync with the earpiece Miranda wore.

"Just got to that one. 287's loading up on Christmas lights, EL wire, and glowsticks as we speak. I got 622 with a helicopter and a hard-on to disregard air traffic control, I got 882 and her pals at Moffett working on research, I got 314 at SFO ready to clear a runway for anyone we ask, and I got 415 at City Hall doing panic-minimization."

"All right. Let's have 287 do her thing and keep working towards having more eyes on it."

* * *

In a Palo Alto strip mall with a view of a golf course and the Bay, Eve McGuinness was the only person in a lighting store, rapidly sorting through colored bulbs and filters. Her phone beeped insistently, her earpiece identifying the caller in a monotone. Briefly wiping a sweaty-fingered hand on her embroidered jeans, she answered.

"Talk to me, 287," Aleph yapped.

"I don't know how these people _live,_ half of these bulbs taste _blatantly wrong,_ I'm almost outta here, _ugh._ "

"You're gonna be trapped by traffic: hustle, yeah?"

"I took the _Zode_. From Fremont. Exactly because traffic is already _balls-awful_. Where do you need me?"

She rolled a rattling shopping cart towards the front, hands tight on its pushbar, panting a little, soles of her purple steeltoe boots squeaking against the tile.

"Perfect. I need you to go as far south as you can get without actually going ashore. Wedge yourself in there with the salt ponds and head for the Guadalupe River. We'll work on clearing traffic for you."

"I have for _years_ fantasized about making a container ship get the fuck out of _my_ way. I'm so on it."

She wrestled the cart through the parking lot—the street—the golf course's paths, polo-shirt wearing investors scowling at her piercings, her clothes, her hair, her suspiciously non-pale skin, and in general her scandalously non-six-figures-making self—the shore—the little dock. Her boat was practically hidden next to the fishing and leisure yacht that was actually registered to dock there. Rigid-hulled, narrow, the Zode was half motor by weight: the "Zodiac" brandmarks had been painted over with a dozen boldly freehanded zodiac symbols in various colors, a leopard-print carpet bag huddled under a tarp at the front, and the motor's casing was not just heavily scuffed but covered in greasy fingerprints and more than a few Dremel scars.

She threw her haul into the Zode armfuls at a time, then clambered down, shoved a few boxes off the seat, and unmoored. Brisk yanks started the engine, and she took off with a flume and a rising prow. Her loose pink hair snapped and waved in the wind, a wide grin on her face.

Salt ponds were passing on her right when Aleph spoke again, supplemental messages making her phone buzz in her pocket.

"All right, the new guy has a 'test pattern' for you. Don't worry about the colossus yet, you're gonna be able to see it soon but it looks closer than it is. Huge damn thing. Focus on getting the lights working and keeping your phone out so we can see what happens."

"I'm on it. Can't _wait_ to see this flying sonofagun a bit closer!"

Eve guided the Zode deftly along the curves between salt ponds, then nudged it up against a steeply-sloped shore. Opening her bag, she pulled out wire strippers and tape: soon there was a messy pile of cardboard and plastic packaging on shore and wires all across her lap and legs as she sat hunched over, lights in a halo around her, changing colors and brightness as she tinkered.

The shadows of the Santa Cruz Mountains crept out onto the bay as the sun fell, evening setting in. The shadow of the colossus emerged from them as it passed over Santa Clara, swimming through the air in a curving, serpentine motion. Eve's head jerked up when she heard its keening, whalelike cry.

"Showtime," Aleph said in her ear.

Eve taped down wires around the rounded tops of the Zode's gunwales: a braid of hastily-patched EL wire and Christmas lights, LEDs peeking out, embedded in little black boxes. Wires freshly wrapped in sharp-smelling black tape led to two dial-studded boxes sitting by the Zode's bench seat and a solid, squat battery under the bench. Glancing at the dimming sky and the lazily-approaching colossus, Eve finished her taping, snapped her phone into a tripod clamped onto the bench, and seated herself, the two boxes in her lap as she pulled the ripcord and started the Zode's snarling engine again.

The purple, blue, and green glow that the Zode threw off grew more visible against dark water and pale wake as Eve snaked back and forth across the channel, heading back towards the open water of the bay. One hand on the tiller, the other hopping between the boxes, she played with the dials, brightening and dimming the lightshow on the gunwales, sparks of red, white, and yellow in it as well.

"Okay—okay, you got it!" Aleph crowed. "Keep taking it slow, give it some time to get to you, but it's definitely interested. You're doing great."

"I _am_ the light and the fucking way!" Eve shouted back, grinning widely as she saw the colossus dip, its profile changing as it headed directly towards her.

* * *

On the winding road just past El Granada, the sunset glaring off on their left, Rob laughed excitedly as he watched the tablet. Miranda Zero glanced at it and smiled reservedly.

"This is great! How'd she get a boat like that? This is awesome. Okay. Let me send her some more test patterns, this is starting to make sense."

"The Governor's pissed, though," Miranda replied with a wince. "I think tonight is all the time we're certain we have for this: they've got civilian air traffic grounded from Santa Rosa to Fresno and the ports are closing. Now that they've had some reaction time, the Navy and the Air Force both want in on this and the Governor's telling us that the price tag on shutting all this down is easily north of a billion dollars a day."

Rob took a deep breath, nodded, and shook the tablet as he spoke.

"Give me a few hours with those lights and I bet I can at least get it back out to sea. Probably easier to have the governor of Hawai'i pissed off at us, right?"

"I can at least throw that into the negotiations. Thanks."

* * *

The Zode zipped back and forth across the calm bay in wide arcs, lights as bright as Eve could make them, the colossus lower and lower, titanic, impossibly huge above her, coiling and straightening as she led it gradually north.

"You're having a blast with this, aren't you?" Aleph laughed.

"Time of my _life,_ lady!" She improvised color changes boldly, a wide, wide grin on her face. "This thing's sounds taste like _delicious candy_. It's so cool."

"Hold on, that was - taste like what?"

"Taste like candy."

There was a pause, then Aleph spoke again, back to her urgent voice.

"Okay, those lights, what's the texture of those lights? You're hooked up to the new guy now too, I need you to tell him this stuff."

"Hi Eve."

"Hey dude. The lights are mostly scratchy, but every so often they go bluecottony, or, like, the purples are flannel-ish, terrycloth-ish."

"What about the colors you're sending?"

"Kinda limited. I just grabbed what was there. Most of the shades and hues I can make are glass, frosted glass, lucite, that kind of way."

"Okay, uh, okay. Can you reliably get the same thing out of different texture-colors? Does it usually start showing frosted-glass colors when you're sending flannel colors?"

"Not really. It's following me and I'm pretty sure I'm seeing patterns, but I'd need bigger lights and more control to really try to match what it's sending."

"I was just thinking that. I can probably suggest better directions to you with the reactions we're seeing, but I can't chew through the possibilities like you're doing, and yeah, better lights."

Aleph broke in again.

"As it happens, I know how to get better lights. All of you get your asses to the airport."

* * *

Tony handed Kenny a set of keys as he stepped out of the driver's seat of the grey utility truck. Kenny took a quick wistful look at his BMW as Miranda Zero drove it off, then nodded appreciatively, patting Tony's shoulder. Together with Rob, they squished into the none-too-roomy cab: Kenny turned the keys, confidently put the truck in gear, and mashed the gas. Tony clutched his laptop and Rob yelped as Kenny confidently whipped the truck around and sent it flying down the sparsely-lit maintenance road. Quickly covering ground, they were on the tarmac only a few minutes later, heading for the water's edge.

Rob and Tony leaned together, focused on Tony's laptop, Tony having to raise his voice to explain controls and commands to Rob. Demonstrating, he set the row of lights along the water's edge to blink, blue-green-off, in a steady cycle. Among those lights, they could soon see the glow of Eve's Zodiac approaching, wreathed in light, skimming along the water with her motor buzzing, the alien lights of the colossus above her.

The truck's toolboxes clanked and rattled as Kenny brought it to a stop past the runway, along the thin maintenance road beyond which land dropped off. The buzz settled, then faded, and there was a scrape as the Zodiac came up against the rough seawall. Eve waved cheerily as she stepped out, thick nylon rope in one hand. She threw a coil of it to Kenny, then turned back to the Zodiac, making sure the motor was tipped up and the screw out of the water by the time Kenny had the rope attached to the truck's tow hitch.

With the Zodiac up on the pavement, all four could work on transferring Eve's improvised lighting to the utility truck's rack. Kenny crouched in the truck's bed, just behind the cab, opening panels in search of a place to splice the lights in and let the truck power them. Tony, Eve, and Rob stood by one of the truck's cabinets, its door unfolded and holding Tony's laptop as he repeated his explanations to Eve and Rob. The runway lights near them cycled through colors stutteringly.

The truck lit up: Kenny made a triumphant armpump. A keening cry split the air: the colossus was approaching them head-on, eyes glowing, its lit-up underside illuminating the sea beneath it with alien colors. A few of its side-fins dipped, sending up plumes where they touched the water. The quartet moved quickly, Kenny and Tony cursing as they hopped in the cab and slammed the doors, Eve whooping in excitement, Rob having to be pulled along as he gawked at it. Holding Tony's laptop, Rob clambered into the back of the truck, Eve close behind him: Kenny laid a patch as the truck took off down the runway, weaving back and forth.

* * *

"Miranda, team—new input," Aleph barked. "We've got a hypothesis on where it came from."

Miranda waited a minute for the team, but the replies were crackly, wind-distorted and drowned out by background noise.

"Pass it on, Aleph."

"It came out of the Tonga Trench, so the research team at Moffett started there. They got ahold of an old-timer from the moon-shot days who's telling them that it's from the Apollo missions, from Apollo 13."

Miranda's phone buzzed, and her tap in response brought up a video of a withered, wispy-haired man in a crisp blue shirt and a NASA ballcap. She leaned on Kenny's BMW and watched.

"We had to do one hell of a lot of improvising. They ran into something. Wasn't any lies about the damage. All real. But wasn't any wiring or cavitation problems either. Something hit 'em. They couldn't properly see it, they talked about later. Was like the air wouldn't properly show its colors. It went for the power, went for the radioactive stuff. Stuck to it like a cloud, like a jelly, they said, hard to see. It got into the generator in the LM, they lost track of it. But they weren't in the LM anymore, and we were already planning to dump the sonofabitch in the ocean."

He paused, catching his breath, and had a few sips from a glass of water provided by someone off-camera.

"So down it went. Navy tried to get it back. Stubborn sonsabitches. Thing's best left alone. We got enough trouble trying to get off this rock without people thinking we brought back aliens. We got enough things to be scared of. Deal with aliens later."

"And now it's 'later'," Aleph concluded as the video faded out. "Half the story's verifiable: the Apollo 13 Lunar Module was using a radiation-based electrical generator, which had nearly ten pounds of plutonium in it. Not the kind you'd use in a bomb, but that's still quite a bit of the stuff. The pre-accident mission plan called for it to be dumped in the Tonga Trench on return to Earth, and there are independent eyes confirming that that part happened. Apollo 13 went down in early 1970, and the Navy took quite an interest in Pacific surveying in the next few years, but it faded away by the late '70s. The research team's still looking for other NASA or Navy sources to cross-check, but my read is that 'radioactive alien' is as good an explanation as we're gonna get."

"What do you get when you cross an alien color, deep-sea fauna, and ten pounds of plutonium?" Miranda Zero mused, looking towards the colossus from the roof of SFO's parking garage.

"Something that sits wherever it wants," Aleph deadpanned.

* * *

The colossus had begun to earnestly chase the rattling utility truck, Eve and Rob struggling to stay upright in the back. They passed the laptop carefully back and forth, shouting as they traded suggestions, their glances split between the screen and the closely-following colossus. It wings flexed, its asymmetric eyes glowed faintily, and many of its fins were down, making enormous scraping sounds as they dragged over tarmac and lifted again. It followed them northwest along the runway, then banked as they turned around, half its body still following the earlier line by the time its head was pointed at them again. The truck slowed a little as they headed back torwards the water, giving Eve and Rob a minute of easier riding.

"It's _working!_ " Eve yelled, pointing to it. "That's the same pattern as a couple minutes ago! It _answered_ us!"

She and Rob bounced in the truck's bed, shouting excitedly.

"Try another, try that second one!"

They moved closer to the truck's tailgate, hanging onto the rack overhead, watching the colossus pull closer and closer, its head alone larger than the truck, the runway beneath it brightly lit by its glowing belly-lines. Its jaws opened and closed slightly, a separate glow coming from within its maw. Its skin was beached-kelp brown where it was stretched over bones: in fleshier parts it faded quickly into lighter sandy tones. It swayed from side to side in flight like a snake over rocky ground. Around them, the runway lights glowed vividly, a few giving out as demanding programs of color-change radiated out from the laptop.

A few message-attempts later, the colossus surged forward, its cries going deeper, elongating, echoing. Its maw opened gradually, displaying fine, short teeth around the edges and glowing pink-purple flesh within, the glow intensifying deeper in. Crackling sounds accompanied its voice, and sparks began to flit back and forth, first inside its mouth, then leaping forward and out.

"Maybe don't try that one again."

"Yeah, _that_ doesn't look good."

The titanic jaws were lined with pearlescent-glowing fangs, and at the back of the colossus' mouth was a pale blue glow that grew more and more intense. Inside the truck, the glow quickly made the rearview mirror an impediment and threw out a shadow of the truck's cab and frame in front. The colossus' cry rose in pitch, louder and louder, oscillating, more and more unearthly, making itself felt through the metal and glass structures of the truck.

"Talk, talk, _talk!_ " Aleph urged. "We can't tell what's going on out there, team, stream of consciousness is fine, just give us a yell and check in."

"Driving!" Kenny bellowed.

"Not driving!" Tony yelled, hunched down in the seat, hands over ears.

The sound erupted as the brightness peaked, the back window shattering into the cab, the others forward and outwards. The truck's motor made dangerous metal-on-metal shrieks as a resonant note assaulted it. Incoherent yelling continued over Aleph's voice as Kenny took a sharp turn and sent the truck into the grassy strip beside the runway. Brown stripes of dirt sprang from the grass as he pumped the truck's brakes. The colossus continued on and up, the glow from its underside sweeping past, leaving lines of color shining across the truck.

Its cry peaked, then began to fade and change pitch, the shadows cast by its lights changing as well, its tail swinging widely. The colossus' colors were stranger and stranger as it rose into the sky, making a tight spiral upwards, its sounds falling further and further, distant as though underwater. It lit the underside of a few clouds and the tops of a few waves on the bay, climbing steadily.

"Whoa, she's outta here!" Aleph exclaimed, clapping as she watched the colossus ascending.

* * *

When the black BMW pulled up, leading an ambulance and a fire truck, Kenny and Tony were sitting on the utility truck's tailgate trading stories about bad wiring. They waved. Tony held up an earpiece and mimed "broken." Miranda Zero nodded as she strode towards them.

"Where are Rob and Eve?"

They shook their heads.

"Absolutely no idea."

"We backtracked a bit. No blood or anything."

"All that was left in the bed was my laptop and a couple piles of clothes."

"Is that what the paramedics and the hazmat guys are here for?" Kenny asked, leaning to one side to peek around Miranda.

"Yes. When the colossus was glowing, it was also fairly hot—in the radioactive sense. We have an agent in Berkeley who says we probably ruined his physics experiment on account of the spike. It's fading extremely fast, though, which is why I'm not wearing a suit. Our best guess is that the colossus took the radiation with it."

"You got a best guess about Rob and Eve?" Tony asked.

Miranda paused. A pair of firefighters circled the truck with geigertellers. The paramedics took the opportunity to move past Miranda to around Tony and Kenny, checking them for shock.

"That bad, huh?" Kenny asked, rolling his eyes at the paramedics.

She put her mouth to one side.

"We don't have a guess."

"Shit. I liked them."

"Surfer guy seemed cool. I was going to go see Eve's installation," Tony added.

"Well, if they show up again, you'll be the first ones we call."

Miranda looked down at her phone, then up abruptly, stepping back and shading her eyes. Far above, a glowing spark fell. A beam cut through the sky, a pale core with a curling, faintly pink spiral around it, together arcing towards the airport. Miranda pointed: Tony, Rob, and the first responders all turned their heads, following her finger. Aleph's whoop could be heard clearly through Miranda's phone.

"It's them! Hey Miranda, can we be the Interplanetary Frequency?"

Miranda laughed as she stepped around the cars and onto the runway, the rest trailing behind her. The approaching light soon resolved, on Miranda's screen, into a flying humanoid figure, a pale glow around it, its body the blue-green of a tropical island's water over pale sand. Around it darted another, brilliantly pink with glimmering pale lights suspended in it. In just minutes, they were close enough to be seen without the phone, and then the blue-green one was swooping down, landing.

Eve circled overhead, unearthly laughter coming down from her as she swam through the air, her hair long and flowing with a cloudy galaxy of stars seeming suspended in it. Rob came down, stood on the tarmac, then spoke in color, light, and whalesong for a moment, arms spread joyfully, then, with visible effort, modulated down to speech.

"Returnful greeting for pod and school, intertidal!"

Miranda nodded slowly, but smiled. She looked Rob up and down: his shoulders were wide, his chest stocky, and his limbs faintly shorter. When he gestured, there were webs between his fingers, and a thick rudder of a tail hung behind him, flexing with his enthusiastic movements. From his shoulders, sides, and legs, little fins protruded, like the rest of his body in shades of shallow-water blue-green. His neck was quite thick, and little lines suggested gills on its sides.

"Welcome back."

"Tide outflowing, carrying selfschool seawards, depthwards. Carrying Global Frequency memory-remoras, sheltering."

"He means," Eve crooned, "that he's gotta head for the ocean, but things are still chill and he's gonna remember you."

She laid casually on her side seven feet in the air: elongated, thin, and elfin, her body like a window onto a starscape. Her hair floated all around her head in a cloud, little glimmers appearing and disappearing within it. Rob laughed brightly and nodded, smiling as Eve spoke, waving demonstratively in her direction.

"We'd love it if you stuck around, but it sounds like you both just picked up a new set of priorities."

"Pretty much. If he's feeling like I am, he's just gonna be gleefully exploring oceans and being a glow-bro for as long as he can get away with. I recommend you just, I don't know, lure him with a handful of sushi from time to time."

"Okay, that's good. Are you also heading for the ocean?"

"I'm going to space, baby. I have no idea whether I'll be back. If I see Voyager I'll blow it a kiss on my way by. I always was a bit of an alien freakshow, so hey, this is great for me."

"Come back any time," Miranda said with a smile. "Earth could use more alien freakshows like you two."

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story where I stretched a bit. Cold opens and the "I have a plan" scene that jumps directly into people executing the plan are both quite a bit more difficult to execute in prose than I imagined. There are plenty of parts where I really ought to polish it, where I can already see flaws and I itch to go back and restructure, rewrite. But that is not a November project: November is for writing bravely and moving on. I'm happy with this story in that light. 
> 
> It was neat to go and reread the original run of _Global Frequency_ looking for structure and framework—as much of a thrill as it is to have Miranda Zero roll up and say "You're on the Global Frequency," there's a bit more to it. I feel like I did a reasonable job of emulating that structure here—and of course it was fun to come up with agents, something weird for them to deal with, and a geography for them to work in. San Francisco is the city of my heart and the Bay Area is home, so all the research to make sure that the colossus follows a coherent course and the GF agents work with the Bay Area as I know it, was delightful. To save you a few minutes of Googling: Apollo 13 really did dump some plutonium into the Tonga Trench, the "Kaholo" and "Rachel Carson" were both real research vessels operating in 2014, and if you've got a big engine and a big dose of Coyote in you, you really can get from Fremont to Palo Alto to the Guadalupe River to SFO by Zodiac (hat tip, of course, to Neal Stephenson's _Zodiac_ ). 
> 
> If you are a fan of Team ICO's _Shadow of the Colossus_ , I should point out that the colossus in this story is a combination of Phalanx from the game, Lovecraft's Colour Out Of Space, and a few flourishes of mine. Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful game and its colossi always struck me as tragic, so it was nice to invite one into this world and give it a happy ending.


End file.
